'Olmert bombed Syria despite US diplomacy'

In exclusive with 'Post', former US foreign policy advisor Elliott Abrams defends Netanyahu over critical State Comptroller report.

syria nuclear reactor site 311.
(photo credit:Courtesy ISIS)

Former prime minister Ehud Olmert decided in September 2007 to bomb the al-Kabir
nuclear facility in Syria after then-president George W. Bush told him the US
had opted for the diplomatic route and would try to get the International
Atomic Energy Agency to close the site, Elliott Abrams told The Jerusalem Post
on Thursday.

Asked about Wednesday’s Israeli State Comptroller’s Report
chastising the government for a haphazard decision-making process, Abrams said
Bush was provided with impeccable options, policy papers and
intelligence.

“We took it all to the president – covert options, military
options, diplomatic options – and he chose the wrong option,” said Abrams, who
at the time was the deputy national security advisor in the White House. “It is
a mistake to believe that the process itself will provide you with the right
answer.”

The State Comptroller’s Report was highly critical of Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for not fully empowering his National Security
Council, as mandated by law, and for a sloppy, informal decision-making process
leading up to the Mavi Marmara raid in May 2010.

Abrams, however, used
the Syrian nuclear facility issue to illustrate that what is more important than
thorough preparation and a good process is the right people making the right
decisions. He also said that some of the best White House meetings were informal
ones where no notes were taken.

He said that his preferred option in the
summer of 2007, when intelligence information emerged that the Syrians were
building a nuclear facility, was for Israel to take it out in order for
Jerusalem to rebuild its deterrence capability following the Second Lebanon War
a year earlier. He added that then-vice president Dick Cheney argued for the US
to bomb the facility itself to rebuild America’s deterrence
capability.

Cheney, in his memoirs In My Time, wrote that not only would
a US strike demonstrate America’s seriousness concerning nonproliferation, “it
would enhance our credibility in that part of the world, taking us back to where
we were in 2003, after we had taken down the Taliban, taken down Saddam’s
regime, and gotten Gaddafi to turn over his nuclear program.”

But the
option Bush chose, some six weeks before Israel acted, was the one preferred by
secretary of state Condoleezza Rice: Make the existence of the facility public
and then go to the IAEA and UN and build an international consensus to get the
Syrians to close it.

Abrams said he thought the idea was “absurd” and
that Syrian President Bashar Assad would defy the IAEA and do nothing.

When Bush informed Olmert of the US decision in July 2007,
Abrams recalled, Olmert said the strategy was unacceptable to Israel. It was
clear to everyone that from this point on there would be no sharing of plans and
that “Israel would let us know afterward,” he said.

Indeed, according to
Abrams, Israel informed Washington immediately after the September 7, 2007,
strike. A decision was then made not to “rub the Syrians’ nose in the matter” by
making it public, thinking that if everyone remained quiet Assad would not be
compelled to hit back. Indeed, news of the attack began trickling out in the
Turkish media a couple of weeks afterward when jettisoned parts of Israeli
fighter jets were found in Turkish territory.

Relating to the
comptroller’s report, which he had only read about, Abrams – here for a
conference on US-Israel relations that begins on Monday at the Begin-Sadat
Center for Strategic Studies in Ramat Gan – said that in the US the National
Security Council serves as a powerful counterweight to the military on national
security policy. In Israel, though, where the IDF is a dominant institution,
there is no equivalent counterbalance.

He said both “no” and “yes” when
asked whether he thought the IDF wielded too much policy-making power in
Israel.

“No, in that given the security situation here it would be hard
to define what is ‘too much,’” he said. “[The IDF] should be a critical factor
in most decisions.”

The “yes,” he added, was because it takes a lot of
determination and political strength to disagree with the military, “because
they may be right, and [the prime minister] may be wrong.”

If the prime
minister were to go against the military, Abrams said, he would inevitably be
met with leaks by officers asking what he truly knows about security matters and
whether military issues should not be within the purview of the
military.

This, in turn, could lead to public relations and political
problems, with the prime minister asking himself at the end of the day why he
needs the headache and whether it would not just be wiser to go along with the
military’s position.

In that type of scenario, Abrams said, the prime
minister must be extremely determined to want to go up against the defense
establishment.